Author: Richard Freeborn (Page 13 of 14)

This past week my tickler file reminded me of the submission windows opening for a couple of magazines. For those who don’t follow these dates, there are several magazines that have very specific reading periods throughout the year, and I have a couple of stories that looked a good fit for these publications.

Just to confirm my thinking, I jumped onto the web site of one of the publications and got hit with a large font editorial headline making an extreme political statement. The headline was triggered, I assume by some of the events going on in the world at the moment. Rather than immediately dismiss it, I clicked in and read the full article which reinforced the statement but didn’t offer any solutions, either in the body of the article, or in the recommended links.

It’s easy to condemn and lobby to tear something down, not so easy to come up with a considered solution. The solution might not be perfect, no solution ever is, but the article would, in my mind, have carried more weight had it offered a way forward.

I went on to the submission guidelines page with a small nag of disquiet. One of the first guideline bullet points was authors should not submit stories with any political bias or agenda.

Wait! What?

So the editor can make these statements, but as a writer, I can’t submit a story that makes the same points, or perhaps expresses a different viewpoint?

I’ve given this a lot of thought over the past few days. I still think my story is a good fit for that magazine, and the magazine pays above average rates, but I won’t be sending it to them.

By making the statements on the site, the editor has already politicized the magazine, and telling writers they can’t submit stories with a similar message is, to my mind, just another form of censorship.

On which note, I’ll step down from the soap box and let the next person have their say.

It’s been a while since I posted anything here. Not that nothing has been happening, and while it would be easy to blame COVID, there seem to have been so many things going on, that putting a few paragraphs here has continued to slide down the list.

I watched the launch and splashdown of the SpaceX mission, and openly confess to a lump in my throat at both ends of the mission. I’ll definitely be watching when the next mission launches in September. Another event that didn’t get as much media coverage was comet Neowise, that completed its slingshot around the Sun and is now heading back toward the outer Solar System. As I write this in mid-August, you may still be able to see it in the western sky. I went out a couple of weeks ago and managed to find Neowise through binoculars. It wasn’t as spectacular SpaceX, but impressive all the same.

On the writing front, it’s been a mixed bag. Written words have been much lower than I planned, or wanted, and the Babylon novel is making steady progress, although slower than I’d like. I have a planned publication date, and will let everyone know when it firms up.

Finally, my Babylon short story “Family Harmony” is in the September/October issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, available now.

The end of May saw some of the pandemic restrictions lifted here, and a gradual reopening of businesses. It has been interesting to see how different stores have approached precautions and distancing. Some are requiring masks and gloves, while others, notably the big home improvement stores, seem to have a more blase approach.

I had thought myself sheltered from the challenges of creativity I’ve seen many others writers write about during the lock down, but it all came to a head in May when the words just dried up. It wasn’t a block of any form. I knew what I wanted to write but it felt more comfortable to drift from one distraction to another. My daughter talks about having the attention span of a broken stapler, and that’s how May felt.

Some of that feeling has drifted over into June as well, but I think I see light at the end of the tunnel, and not just from the pandemic. We’ll see how it all looks when I write the June recap in a few weeks time.

When I first published Angels Without Faces onto Amazon, Apple, and Kobo, I confess it was very much a click and close my eyes exercise. As I’ve learned more over the past few months, and built a backlog of stories to publish, I decided to have a look at the pricing I have in place.

Each of the major sites above takes the US dollar price and converts to local currency. For some locations, this is acceptable. For others, such as India, the converted price is substantially out of line with the norms in that market place.

So, I engaged in an exercise to adjust prices as necessary, and align across the Amazon, Apple, and Kobo platforms. Easy, right? As long as you keep a note by currency or territory it should be.

Except . . .

Amazon has a set of minimum prices by currency, and won’t allow you adjust below that. Apple and Kobo change the royalty as you change the price, and have different mininums. An hour into it, despite the note taking and multiple screens, I was totally confused and exited out of it all. Amazon defines the price by the Amazon store, Apple by country, and Kobo by currency.

Time for a rethink, and then jump in again. It would be nice if I could set a template for each price point – $2.99, $4.99 etc., and apply that to the book I’m publishing. If it’s there, I haven’t found it yet!

Spoiler alert. This post is not about story titles!

In the corporate world, I’ve never been someone who really focuses on a position title. Very often they seem meaningless – look at the banks for example, every third person seems to have a title which includes “Vice President.”

I was reminded of this as I scrolled through LinkedIn earlier this week (Yes, I admit it, but we’re into week three of shelter-in-place” and it’s far too early to begin happy hour). Anyway, as I scrolled down, I saw a post from an executive at a Fortune 500 company and his title was listed as Chief Experience Officer.

How do you get a job like that? In the accompanying picture, the executive looked to be at least ten years younger than I am. Does that make me better qualified because I have more life experience? What are the qualifications for a Chief Experience Officer? How do you get on that career track?

Similarly, I saw a separate post congratulating someone for being at a company for several years. The position was described as Chief Solutions Officer. I can almost get that one, but in reality aren’t all executives “Solutions Officers?” Whether it’s existing operational solutions, new business solutions, or strategic solutions.

Maybe as I said earlier, that because I’ve never really focused on job titles, I’ve missed a shift in the position-naming culture and the world has passed me by. Or maybe these corporations are ahead of us all and are re-positioning for the post-Covid world.

Or maybe I should stay away from LinkedIn!

There’s not much to report this week. I did complete my weekly short story which ended up with a little more of a supernatural theme than I intended, or expected.

Apart from that, I started the next phase of laying decking down the attic space. The goal is to move everything from my storage unit into the attic. I suspect part of that exercise will involve substantial donations to Goodwill!

I’ll post a more detailed February update next week, but at this point, February, like January was a bit of a mixed month. I’m beginning to think that’s the way of the world: some good, and some not so good.

Last week’s short story, is a case in point. It was my forty-third consecutive story in the one-a-week challenge, and came together pretty well, except for the ending, which seemed a bit flat to me.

After I’d finished, I went through a little angst about it. Should I have outlined, and come up with a better ending? The end of that road is insanity, and there are some in my family who will comment that I’m only a short drive away! The thing is, if I rewrite the ending whole chunks of the main part of the story need to change or leave, and then it’s not the same story.

In the end, I decided to leave it alone and maybe one day I’ll write the other version. It won’t be this week. This week I’m back with Tiswin my Mage Weaver.

All I know at the moment is it snowed last night in Cloudcroft. I had the usual moment of doubt about where the story’s going and then this morning I was reading the Success Principles by Jack Canfield. At the start of one section there’s a quote from Martin Luther King Jr.:

Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase. Just take the first step.

I think that’s a great statement for everyone who writes into the dark.